Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr Welcomes President
Jane Dammen McAuliffe

July 1 , 2008

Jane Dammen McAuliffe takes office today as the eighth president of Bryn Mawr College, succeeding Nancy J. Vickers.

McAuliffe's appointment was ratified by the College's Board of Trustees in February. Her accession to the presidency will be celebrated with a series of events culminating in an inauguration ceremony in October.

"Given her outstanding leadership ability and deep experience, I can think of no one to whom I would rather entrust the bright future of Bryn Mawr College than Jane McAuliffe," said Board of Trustees Chair Sally Hoover Zeckhauser on McAuliffe's appointment. "She is an exceptionally strong, accomplished, and visionary woman. During her tenure at Georgetown University, she served as a creative and effective advocate for change, and as an exemplar for distinguished scholarship. She is universally admired for having cultivated close collegial relationships.

"As a graduate of a women’s college herself, Jane appreciates the transformative role that such an education can play in both a student’s immediate learning and later life. As president of Bryn Mawr College, she will ensure that our students have the diverse, dynamic, and challenging undergraduate experience that will serve them well as members of an ever more connected global society," Zeckhauser said.

McAuliffe comes to Bryn Mawr from Georgetown University, where she was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In that role, she enhanced faculty recruitment and diversity, developed initiatives to foster more effective teaching and student advising, and expanded the number of undergraduate majors and minors in contemporary fields of inquiry. She has also built several graduate programs, including two new Ph.D. programs, and successfully raised funds to build a performing arts center, to endow faculty positions, to create scholarships and to launch a science center.

She has long been committed to programs that support the notion that the best educated and prepared students are those who experience on campus the same multicultural world that lies beyond. McAuliffe also believes that a strong grounding in the natural sciences is essential for addressing the pressing and complex issues facing contemporary society.

As a scholar, McAuliffe is an internationally respected specialist in Islamic studies whose expertise is in the Qur’an and its interpretations, early Islamic history, and the interrelationships between Islam and Christianity. In addition to publishing numerous books and journal articles, she recently completed the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, the first reference work of its kind in a Western language.

McAuliffe received a Ph.D. (1984) and M.A. (1979) from the University of Toronto, and a B.A. from Trinity College (1968). Her scholarly work has been supported by several prestigious fellowships, including one from the Guggenheim Foundation, and she was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has served on the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims as well as on the boards of the American Academy of Religion, of which she was president in 2004, the Association of Theological Schools, and Trinity University. She has been Dean of Georgetown College since 1999 and, before that, held faculty and administrative positions at Emory University and the University of Toronto. She is married to Dr. Dennis McAuliffe, a scholar of medieval Italian literature at Georgetown University. They are the parents of four children.

To learn more about Dr. McAuliffe’s professional and personal background, please see her profile, her curriculum vitae, and the College’s press release on her appointment.